Creating Letterboxed video on DVD (1 Viewer)

[MarkHastings]

I have some 16x9 video that I've recorded and captured into my computer. I used Adobe Premier to edit all the clips and I've output a 16x9 (1.2 pixel width) DV AVI file. I've burned the DVD and played it in my DVD player (on my 16x9 tv) and everything is fine and dandy.

My problem is, my brother wants a copy of the DVD for himself. He does not have a 16x9 tv, so I have to create a DVD with the black bars on top and bottom.

To back up a bit and answer the obvious question ("Why not have the DVD add the black bars?")...I am using NeoDVDPlus to create my DVD's. It's not a pro piece of software, but it'll do for right now. The problem with the software (and what I understand), it doesn't allow me to flag the anamorphic (16x9) video so that a DVD player will add the black bars (automatically) in 4x3 mode. I've tried this with my 16x9 DVD and I just can't get the player to add the bars.

Back to my issue. I figured by taking the video into Premiere and shrinking the height, I'd be adding the black bars myself. I shrunk the height by 83.3% (which created a letterbox look to the video), then output a 0.9 pixel DV AVI File, then I burned that to the DVD.

The letterbox trick worked (i.e. it added the black bars to the video) , but I'm having a BAD interlacing problem. I assume the interlacing got screwed up when I shrunk the video in Premiere???? I've already gone through a few blank DVD's and I really can't afford to play around with different scenarios.

I have a DVD-RW drive, but (obviously) the interlacing problems don't show up on the computer so I'm stuck with burning DVD-R's and testing them on my tv.

Does anyone have any suggestions????

Thanks


p.s. I also assumed that maybe resizing the height to 83.3% might be bad, so I tried an even number and that didn't work either. I've even tried outputting the video as an uncompressed avi with 'Deinterlacing' checked and that still didn't get rid of the interlacing.

 

[Chris Moe]

TMPEG ENC can do this for you (you can get a free trial version).

Here is a quick run down, I'm doing this all by memory so I may be a little off.

Start TMPEG
Close out the wizard if it pops up
load you video up
hit the settings button
go to advanced
Then you can set the size of your video, and you can keep the aspect ratio. There will be choices like center keep aspect ratio, center custom size, etc.

Hope that helps. I don't have TMPG here at work so I can't give you a better explanation

 

[Jeff Kleist]

You can also flag the stream as 16:9 and the player automatically downconverts

I believe John Berger wrote a program to do that

 

[John_Berger]

I didn't see anything on MedioStream's site about NeoDVDPlus supporting 16x9 DVDs, so I don't think that my tool will matter in this case.

 

[MarkHastings]

John,

Thanks for checking. When you say it doesn't support 16x9 DVD's, I assume you are referring to the flags on an anamorphic video that squishes video (by the player) on 4x3 tv's?

In the meantime, I was able to use Adobe After Effects to add the black bars and render an uncompressed AVI without interlacing...that method worked well for me, but it's just an awkward way of doing things.

Does anyone know how to do this properly through Premiere? or can anyone recommend another DVD software package that flags 16x9 video for letterbox "squishing" on a 4x3 tv? Preferably cheap.

How about Sonics DVDit?
http://www.dvdit.com/about_features.html
One of the features is "Widescreen (16:9) Video Support", is this what I'm looking for?


Chris, I checked out TMPEG ENC, but all I saw was the VCD version (i.e. MPEG-1).

 

[Ken Chan]

I've burned the DVD and played it in my DVD player (on my 16x9 tv) and everything is fine and dandy.

If you don't have 16:9 support in your DVD authoring package, then this must mean that you used the stretch mode on your TV to make everything look right? If so, that is "just wrong"

Yes, DVDit! would have the necessary feature for true 16:9. That would be the best choice, because you'd preserve the vertical resolution of your 16:9 material (if it was natively recorded that way originally; otherwise all this is for naught).

If you want to manually letterbox interlaced material, the proper way is to separate each field into its own frame, resize them, and then reinterlace the fields back into a single frame. AviSynth could do that with a fairly simple script, and it's free.

If you're encoding to DVD (or any other MPEG format), you should try to make one or both of the "black bars" a multiple of 16 pixels high. Otherwise, the hard boundary would be in the middle of a macroblock, which won't compress well or look good.

//Ken

 

[MarkHastings]

If you don't have 16:9 support in your DVD authoring package, then this must mean that you used the stretch mode on your TV to make everything look right? If so, that is "just wrong"

I use 'Standard' Mode. I recorded the material in 16x9...captured the files as 'Widescreen (1.2)'...then burned the movies to DVD (just like anamorphic video). I realize that this DVD won't play properly on a 4x3 tv (i.e. the 16x9 image would vertically stretch to fill the screen), but the DVD is just for me and my 16x9 tv, that's all. Why is that wrong?

 

[John_Berger]

Why is that wrong?

Don't mind Ken. He's being a smart ass by implying that if you have a 16:9 TV you should be making anamorphic DVDs instead of 4:3 DVDs.

Regarding your problem with black bars (which should have absolutely no bearing on interlacing, by the way), I've done this with Media Studio Pro with no problems.

Case in point -- I acquired a movie off the Internet that I converted to DVD. (That's all that I'll say on the subject, but I have full intentions on buying the DVD when it comes out later this year.) Unfortunately, after extracting the audio and video, the resulting image that I had to work with was a full 4:3, exactly like an anamorphic 4:3 piece of film. I was able to squish the video to an appropriate aspect ratio with no problems whatsoever. The DVD looks great -- not as good as the real thing will, but it will hold me over for now.

So, there are two culprits - either Premiere did not encode properly or the DVD software did not transcode properly. What files are you importing into the DVD? AVI or DVD-ready MPEG-2? I think that I know the answer since MPEG-2 is not Premiere's strong point.

 

[MarkHastings]

Don't mind Ken. He's being a smart ass by implying that if you have a 16:9 TV you should be making anamorphic DVDs instead of 4:3 DVDs.

That's what I thought. To reiterate, I am creating the letterboxed DVD's for my friends and family who don't have widescreen tv's.

 

[John_Berger]

Could there be an issue with taking the widescreen DV file (1.2) and bringing it into a non-widescreen Project (0.9)????

It's possible. If the DVD authoring software didn't do the downconversion properly, you could get problems like what you described. Jeff Kleist could probably answer that better than I do as he's more familiar with the workings of Adobe's products. Personally, I would put the blame on using an AVI file instead of a DVD_ready MPEG-2 file more than I would Adobe.

 

[Chris Moe]

Chris, I checked out TMPEG ENC, but all I saw was the VCD version (i.e. MPEG-1).

http://www.tmpgenc.net/e_main.html

Trust me, you can use it to encode mpeg2 for DVD use.

 

[John_Berger]

The drawback to TMPGenc, however, is that you have to encode twice - once to create the master AVI file then again to rerender it through TMPGenc to MPEG-2. Depending on the speed of the system, that could take a huge amount of time.

So, anyone looking at this will have to balance the time needed to do this sort of thing with the cost of having a video editing package that can do all of this right out of the box. (From what I've heard, MSP 7.0 will now create 16:9 MPEG-2 files as well, thus preventing the need to re-run an MPEG-2 file through my tool or TMPGenc.)

 

[MarkHastings]

I absolutely refuse to use AVI files when creating DVDs. I strictly use MPEG-2 for my DVD source files

I realize that starting with MPEG-2 files is the best way to do things (i.e. better control over the final quality), but considering the software encodes the AVI files to MPEG-2 before it burns the DVD, is it really that bad? Granted, it's not the way I prefer doing things, but capturing DV files is the easiest (and cheapest) way right now.

If it's a quality issue, then I agree that the NeoDVD software I have is no where near what I'd like it to be (as far as creating the MPEG-2 streams), but most of my home DVD stuff is just personal use and I can live with the quality until I can afford something better. I hope the DVDit Pro. encoder does a better job? or am I paying more money for more functionality with these packages and not for the quality of MPEG-2 compression? The web site mentions bit rate control of MPEG-2 conversions, but it doesn't say what the rates are.

 

[Chris Moe]

The drawback to TMPGenc, however, is that you have to encode twice - once to create the master AVI file then again to rerender it through TMPGenc to MPEG-2. Depending on the speed of the system, that could take a huge amount of time.

Now I am not completely sure but I believe that this is incorrect. You can take you original file and do the aspect ratio encoding and conversion to mpeg2 all at the same time, no need to make a master and then rerender. I could be wrong, but I don't think so. Either way you look at TMPEG is slow though.

 

[John_Berger]

You can take you original file and do the aspect ratio encoding and conversion to mpeg2 all at the same time, no need to make a master and then rerender.

That's correct. My point is that if you use an authoring tool that handles MPEG-2 natively and you are not concerned about 16:9 (unless the editing software supports it), there is no need to waste time rendering an AVI only to have to re-render it to get MPEG-2.

 

[Chris Moe]

Ah gotcha, I thought you were saying you would have to take the original avi, re-encode to avi in the correct aspect ratio and then re-encode again to mpeg2.

 

[Ken Chan]

I realize that starting with MPEG-2 files is the best way to do things (i.e. better control over the final quality)

The reverse is true; you have only one shot at the setting the quality, because you're encoding on-the-fly. You don't want to re-encode MPEG. Also, because it's real-time, you need high-end hardware to get the best quality (although that will probably change eventually). If you capture to AVI and encode afterward (hardware or software) you can do multiple passes.

Of course, capture to MPEG-2 is the simplest, and the field order is embedded in the file, unlike AVI.

//Ken

 

[MarkHastings]

Did the line appear to jump back and forth (sorta like going to the right two feet, then back to the left one foot, the forward again)? If so, then your field order got flipped. DV is lower field first.

That's what it looks like, but I always keep it on "Lower Field First".

EDIT: Deleted...reason: Whatever

 

[Ken Chan]

considering it works on my tv, there's no reason to say I'm doing it "Wrong".

That's actually a case where two wrongs do make a right! But never mind....

First, as a general tip, if you're doing screenshots to show these pixel-level flaws, you should try to use PNG (Portable Network Graphics) instead of JPG, if your program supports it (or export a BMP and use another program to convert to PNG). JPEG is a lossy format that makes the picture blocky, while PNG is lossless and does not alter the image. (GIF is also lossless, but only does 256 colors.)

Second, those aren't the same frames, are they? The hand looks like it's in a slightly different position. And is the frame supposed to be in the middle of a horizontal pan? Because unless the pan is really slow, it doesn't look like it. You should clearly see the "comb" effect when the frames are interlaced.

The screenshot on the right doesn't appear to have any weird interlacing, per se. It looks like the victim of a bad resizing algorithm, like a straight "throw away the pixels" resize. The simplest way to reduce the height to 83% is to throw away every sixth row. Doing that would produce results similar to what you've got.

By the way, to letterbox your 16:9 clip for 4:3, shouldn't the height be reduced to 75%, not 83.3%?

One thing you could try is to use the Transform, but instead of squishing vertically, squish 50% horizontally only. This should avoid any interlacing issues. If horizontal panning turns out OK, then that means there's something wrong with the way Transform squishes vertically. If that is also screwed up, then the mere act of applying the Transform is causing the problem.

Also, try resizing with VirtualDub. It's more straightforward and you get more control for this kind of thing than with Premiere.

//Ken

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Yeah, it should be 75%, not 83%.

There's no telling what the transform is doing to the video, but you're going about it the wrong way. Adobe Premiere can automatically letterbox video which doesn't match the aspect ratio of the project, you just have to tell it to do it.

1. Set the aspect ratio of the project to DV 4:3 (0.9), because 4:3 is what you want to output.

2. Import your widescreen video clip, but don't put it on the timeline yet. Premiere probably doesn't realize that the video is widescreen. You need to tell it that it is.

3. Make sure the clip is highlighted in the project bin. Go to the Clip menu and choose Advanced Options-->Pixel Aspect Ratio. If it doesn't say DV Widescreen (1.2) then make it so. (On my computer Premiere always assumes that my DV files are 4:3.)

4. Now you need to tell Premiere to letterbox the clip. Go the Clip menu again, choose Video Options, and put a check mark on Preserve Aspect Ratio. If you want you can also change the color of the "aspect fill" (the black bars) from black to something else, maybe a color suitable to the theme of the video.

5. Now add the clip to the timeline. You should see the clip properly letterboxed on the screen.

Also, if your DVD player is able to play DVD-RW, I recommend you burn DVD-RW for testing until you know everything is perfect, then you can burn a DVD-R. It's much cheaper.